Securing resources for testing is a challenge. While testing costs are easy to quantify, the benefits are much harder to express in monetary terms—the metric decision-makers care about. So how do we price a bug our tests successfully prevented? 

Florian Wartenberg and his team at Vestas found a way! Their wind turbines rely on complex software, and bugs can cause malfunctions, impacting energy production. Once the turbines are deployed, Vestas incurs penalty payments based on such lost energy. Florian tied those penalties back to the software bugs that caused them, attaching a price tag to past bugs. Then he assessed how many of these bugs appeared in untested changes that might have been caught using Test Gap Analysis. As a result, Florian was able to estimate the monetary benefits of improving Vestas’ test processes using Test Gap Analysis. And found it well worth the investment.

In the talk, Florian Wartenberg and Fabian Streitel (CQSE) discuss the test improvement initiative they launched together a year ago. They explain how the cost-benefit analysis ultimately convinced Florian’s management and compare the initial estimates to real-world data from after Test Gap Analysis went live. And they show how you can estimate the monetary value of testing, even if you don’t have penalties in your domain.

Don’t miss out on learning about their strategy for putting a price on the benefits of testing!